


For Always

by prairiecrow



Category: A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001)
Genre: Afterlife, Angels, Fairy Tale Elements, Gen, Ghosts, Little Mermaid Elements, Post-Movie
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-12
Updated: 2016-02-13
Packaged: 2017-11-16 03:31:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,286
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/535003
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prairiecrow/pseuds/prairiecrow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They have waited for two thousand years, keeping watch over the child they both love... but while Monica has the promise of a blessed afterlife, Joe faces only oblivion if he chooses to see David safely through the last stage of his journey.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

_And David continued to pray to the Blue Fairy there before him, she who smiled softly, forever...she who welcomed forever. Eventually the floodlights dimmed and died, but David could still see her palely by day, and he still addressed her, in hope. He prayed until all the sea anemones had shriveled and died, he prayed as the ocean froze and the ice encased the caged amphibicopter, and the Blue Fairy too, locking them together where he could still make her out - a blue ghost in ice - always there, always smiling, always awaiting him. Eventually he never moved at all, but his eyes always stayed open, staring ahead forever all through the darkness of each night, and the next day...and the next day..._

_Thus, 2000 years passed._

Through veils of windswept snow, two figures walk side by side out of the glare of the setting sun.  The sheet of ice upon which they travel, once an ocean, runs to the horizon in all directions -- flat and empty and forbidding; but it has been so for the last several centuries of their existence, and they, in any case, do not feel the cold.  

They do not look at each other, and certainly they do not speak. Over the course of two hundred decades they have only barely come to tolerate each other’s company. For months and even years at a time they exist apart from this place and from each other, but whenever the time comes for them to visit the shrine of their mutual devotion, they always undertake the pilgrimage together -- she lovely and soft in her muted colors and soft fabrics, he starkly handsome in gleaming black and midnight silver, united by a common and sacred impulse.

They had each been incarnated once, long ago. They’d lived their brief lives, and died, and gone on to this existence that awaits all souls when their physical courses have been run -- still intersecting with the mortal world but not really of it, a state of being that is only a gentle transition to the greater reaches of the spirit (her species to the warmth of an earthly Paradise, his into the icy eternal realms beyond the stars).

Everybody they knew, and generations upon generations that followed, have joined them here and eventually passed into those blessed realms, but these two remain, the last of their kind in all the world. They cannot move on because they are bound to this place by their love for the single being who has remained here, incarnate, through the extinction of the human species and the long reign of the higher mecha.  

For two thousand years, they have waited to take David home. 

They come in sight at last of the shattered towers of a lost city in the sea. Their pace quickens. Her face fills with yearning and hope; his mask betrays nothing, but his unblinking jade eyes shine as brightly as the sunlight caught in the shifting snow. 

They enter the lost city which he, at least, saw with mortal eyes before the ice entombed it. Ghosts of the distant past, they pass through the Specialists’ sensor grid without being detected; unseen, they walk among the elongated graceful figures. When they are close their destination they simply walk down through the surface of the snow, proceeding at a gentle angle until they come to a chamber that the high mecha have only recently begun excavating.  

On previous visits they have stood on the ruined pavement of Coney Island, suspended in the frost-green ice; now they find themselves in an immense carved chamber with open air all around them. A huge twisted circle of steel looms high overhead, the remains of an ancient ferris wheel that the ice has kept from disintegration. They spare it no more than a glance, far more concerned with another object that the cold has preserved.  

Together, the travellers walk into a large block of ice that has not yet been cracked open to their ultimate destination: the ancient amphibicopter that became David's church, and ultimately his tomb. David. Imprisoned in ice, he in turn has imprisoned them, because their love and indominable will not permit either of them to rest until he is free. 

They circle to either side of the lifeless craft and stoop a little to enter it -- she on the right, wrapping her insubstantial arms around the cold inert body sitting so straight in the pilot’s seat with wide eyes forever fixed straight ahead, and he from the left to kneel beside David and speak softly into his ear, and touch his shoulder with wraithlike fingers.  

“Hello, Mommy," Teddy says from the back of the craft, in a voice that no Specialist sensor could possibly hear. Like these visitors, he has passed out of his physical shell -- it sits stiff and forlorn in the passenger seat-- and like them, he has refused to leave David's body cold and alone. "Hello, Joe."  

******** 

Monica can still remember with perfect clarity the day she died. 

The unanswered question of what had become of David haunted her until the end, forty-six years after she abandoned him in the woods. She knew that Professor Hobby had spoken with him briefly at the CyberTronics research facility in what had once been New York, and that he’d vanished without a trace immediately after. Was he alone? Was he alive, whatever that word might mean in a world where the line between orga and mecha was rapidly disappearing? 

Lying in her death bed, drifting in and out of consciousness, she scarcely saw the people around her, Henry and Martin and the soft-footed attendants who came and went. Looking back, she saw that the details of it were unimportant. All that really mattered was the moment between one breath and eternity where she came free from her body and found herself looking down on the whole hushed tableau around her bed. For a moment she marvelled at how joyous and sorrowful she felt, and at the knowledge, calmly accepted, that she was dead. 

Then, from somewhere far away, a glint of light caught her attention. A scintillation of sorrow and hope and love. She focused on it with a type of vision she had never imagined existed, and recognized it with even greater joy and deeper sorrow.  

 _David!_ Oh, God, he was still alive! He was alive, and she could go to him with no more effort than the power of a single thought. 

So she did. 

She had no idea why she was standing underwater, on ancient decaying pavement with strange and massive shapes all around her. There was no fear of drowning, only puzzlement. And why was David here, inside a vehicle pinned beneath a mass of twisted metal? Why was he staring so eagerly ahead, and whispering words that at first made no sense to her: 

“Please, Blue Fairy, please, oh please make me into a real boy? Blue Fairy, please, oh please Blue Fairy! Please, please...” 

“David?” She reached hesitantly toward the door of the copter -- how could she open it without losing all the trapped air? -- and received her answer when her fingertips went right through the window. She stepped closer and stood right at David’s side, drinking in the sight of his beloved face that had haunted her dreams and nightmares for what seemed like eternity. There was a gleam in his eyes that troubled her, and he never stopped talking  to something beyond the windscreen. 

“Oh, please, please, Blue Fairy, make me into a real live boy...” 

Her eyes burning with tears, she reached out to stroke the fine blond hair whose smoothness she had mourned for most of her life. 

“So you finally decided to show up, did you?” 

It was a voice she had never heard before, soft and measured, but with an edge that actually made her look up from David’s face. There was a man standing on the other side of the copter, apparently no more troubled by being underwater than she. He was beautifully handsome, and gazed at her with pale jade eyes so brilliantly icy that Monica instantly realized her mistake. This wasn’t human. A mecha? What was a mecha doing down here with David? 

“Watching out for him,” the robot replied coldly. He took a step forward, right through the side of the copter, and his words were full of mockery. “That’s more than you ever did.” 

“Who --” She experienced a fleeting impulse to stand up and back away from him, but her greater instinct was to put her arms protectively around David. “Who are you? What are you doing here?” 

The mecha stopped halfway through Teddy and looked down at her with those unblinking eyes. He seemed very tall and dark and forbidding in the watery darkness -- and dangerous. 

 “I’m Gigolo Joe. Didn’t the Professor tell you? I’m the one who took over looking after David when you threw him away in the woods because you didn’t want him anymore.” 

 “That’s... how did you --?” 

Gigolo Joe smiled, but there was no friendship in it. “Go away. You’re not wanted here.” 

Monica tightened her arms around David, who could neither see nor feel her but went on with his eager prayers to the blue ghost on the other side of the copter’s windscreen. The spectre of this mecha terrified her, but not enough to abandon David again. “No! He’s my son.” 

“Is this how you treat your ‘son’?” Joe knelt gracefully through the passenger seat of the copter and extended a hand toward David. Monica tried to pull David back, but of course could not, and watched helplessly while the mecha’s strong, elegant hand came to rest on the top of David’s head, slowly stroking his hair. For a fraction of a second something like tenderness softened his sharp features; then his eyes slid back to Monica’s and grew icy again. “You send him off to the edge of the world in search of the love you never had for him, and then you show up here and dare to tell me that you *care* about him?” 

“I remember you now. Professor Hobby told me about you. You’re the sex-mecha who killed that woman in Haddonfield!” 

Joe grinned, but it never reached his eyes. “Wrong!” he said almost cheerfully. “But I’m not surprised. Orga are always willing to believe the --” 

A soft whirring sound caught them both by surprise. 

“Hello, Mommy. Hello, Joe.” 

Joe practically leaped away from the passenger seat, ending up halfway through the control console. From where his hips had been, Teddy slowly turned his head and looked in Monica’s direction with his warm brown eyes. Only he wasn’t Teddy, clearly, because Teddy’s body still lay in the seat. 

Joe looked almost comically startled. “You can see us?” 

“Yes.” 

Or was the ghost talking to them now really Teddy, and the body just an empty discarded shell? 

“Then why didn’t you say something before?” Joe demanded. 

“I didn’t see you before,” the supertoy replied, with a hint of irritation.  

“Teddy!” Monica was grateful to have a friendly presence with her in the copter. “What happened? Why is David here?” 

“He was looking for the Blue Fairy,” Joe said. 

“I wasn’t asking you," Monica snapped. 

“Joe sent us down into the water,” Teddy explained while the humanoids glared at each other like cats. “David drove the amphibicopter to this place, and then the metal cage came down on top of us. We’ve been here ever since.” 

“David?” Monica leaned over and put her hand in front of his face. “David?” 

“He can’t see you, Mommy. He can’t see any of us.” 

“Why not?” Monica leaned over to look into David’s face. His eyes were wide and rapt, and looked right through her at the object of his whispered prayers. 

“I don’t know.” 

“Because the Blue Fairy is all he wants to see.” Joe touched light fingertips to David’s cheek, his jewelled eyes gleaming like tears. “I’ve been trying to reach him for the past fifty years, but all he ever does is stare at that bloody statue.” 

Teddy sat up, looking as solid as the body that still lay in the seat, and looked down his belly. “My batteries have worn out.” 

“So you’re ‘dead’ too,” Joe said, as Teddy walked across to the pilot seat and put his paw on David’s arm, peering up at him. “No wonder you can see us. But David’s battery is still going.” He looked across at Monica, a flicker of hope in his voice. “How long will it last?” 

“I, I don’t know.” 

“Ten years? Twenty? Fifty?” 

“I don’t know! They never told us.” 

“So at least a human lifetime, probably.” Joe stood back from David and folded himself into the passenger seat and crossed his long legs at the ankles, ignoring Teddy’s physical body completely. “I’m going to wait. Sooner or later he’ll be able to see me, and then...” 

“And then what?” Monica demanded. 

Joe’s looked at the Blue Fairy, his clear eyes growing clouded. “I don’t know. But I’m going to wait for him. One day he’ll see me, and then we’ll go on from there together.” 

“Go _where_ together?” 

“To whatever’s on the other side of the music.” His voice lilted contemplatively, like the voice of one who is half-dreaming. “All the others who have come and gone -- Samantha, Patricia, Amanda, the Professor... every one of them stayed a little while, but in the end they all said the same thing, that they heard music and that they had to follow it. Then they stepped sideways --” A gliding movement with the edge of his hand, “-- out of time.” 

“What do you mean, ‘out of time’? That doesn’t make any sense.” 

“They didn’t have to stay here,” Teddy said. “Not like you.” 

Monica felt something cold run down her insides. “Teddy, what are you talking about?” 

“There’s something, like a bright blue thread, tying you and David together. Joe has it too.” 

The sex mecha made a rueful half-smile. “And how do you know this?” 

“I don’t know,” the supertoy replied, turning to look at Joe and furrowing his brow. “I just... do.” 

“Right, then, “ Joe said briskly. “Let’s make sure we all have this straight. David’s been here for the past forty-seven years, praying to something that can no more see or hear him than he can see or hear us. There are bright blue threads tying all of us --” He glanced at Teddy for confirmation, and the supertoy nodded. “-- to him, including you,” he stabbed a long finger at Monica, making her flinch, “the so-called ‘mother’ who threw him away when --” 

“I did _not_ ‘throw him away’!” His words cut her to the ghosts of her bones, and she wrapped her arms more tightly around David, pressing her lips to his hair in a brief but fervent caress. Resting her cheek on the top of his oblivious head, she glared at Joe. “I... you don’t understand! It was Henry, and Martin, but I couldn’t just take him back to be destroyed. At least I gave him a chance!” 

“A chance?” Joe leaped up from his seat and spun to kneel at David’s side, facing Monica across the top of the whispering child’s head. At such close range his eyes were as cold as a snake’s, his voice becoming a venomous hiss that made her shrink as far back as she could without releasing her tight hold of David. “They almost poured a bucket of acid over him at the Flesh Fair. Professor Hobby was ready to tear him apart. You call that a chance? I’m sure that Doctor Know would disagree with your definition. I certainly do.” 

Monica stared back at him. Her breathing quickened as apprehension was rapidly replaced by anger. 

“How dare you!” she yelled at him, making him rock back a little in surprise. “You’re not even human! You have no right to talk about love or hate or anything else that goes on in the human heart. I love David! I have always loved him! It’s just... everything went so _wrong_.” She let go of David to brush her hair back off her face with one hand, her eyes suddenly lost. 

Joe studied her for a few seconds. 

“I believe you do,” he said at last in a calmer voice. “And I think we’re both here for the same reason, aren’t we?” 

Monica took a deep breath and pressed her face to David’s hair. She imagined that she could actually smell it, warm with sunlight and laughter: a sensory ghost that lingered even when she had no physical body to support it. Cautiously she raised her eyes to Joe’s, and found him simply gazing at her with no apparent emotion. For some reason that chilled her more than his appearance of anger. She knew how to deal with anger, but she had never been comfortable around the cool impassivity of mecha. 

They were silent for a long few minutes, as Monica held David very tightly and whispered sweet endearments to him, while he whispered his prayers to the Blue Fairy. Joe sat back in the passenger seat, long legs crossed at the knee and head inquisitively cocked, simply watching her. 

At last she really believed that David couldn’t see her, and that his pleas to the blue ghost in the water directly ahead -- already measured in decades -- were not going to be exhausted. She looked up at Joe. He smiled very slightly. 

“For David,” she whispered. 

He nodded. “For David.” 

“What happened? How did he get down here?” 

And so Joe told her, everything from David taking his hand in the cage at the Flesh Fair (he tried to start earlier, but she wouldn’t let him) to his final glimpse of the child-mecha as he was pulled away from the amphibicopter. The telling brought them from the daylight haze of the ocean water to a murky impenetrable darkness, but the floodlights were bright and strong and the Blue Fairy was never far away. It was hard to talk through the endless mantra of David’s prayers, but they managed. 

“... and then I set the amphibicopter to Submerge mode, because of course David didn’t know how to do that himself. And that’s the last I saw of him.” 

For the last segment of the tale, from the instructions of Doctor Know to David telling Joe that he had found the Blue Fairy, Monica had sat with her hand pressed over her mouth and her eyes wide with ethereal tears. It took her a moment to gather her words after Joe fell silent. “Oh, David, no... she was never real, sweetie. It was only a fairy tale...” 

Crouching in the submerged amphibicopter, with the reflected glare of the floodlights tracing David and Joe and Teddy in shadows and edges, Monica suddenly felt very cold and afraid. It was occurring to her what their situation implied.  

She felt like she was going to vomit, but of course she had no stomach to do it with. Did vomit also have a soul that would materialize with them in this -- 

She pushed herself away from David and fell to the rotten concrete outside, barely turning herself over before the retching hit. Nothing came up, but the nausea began to pass. Staring at her hands, pale as jellyfish on the crumbling pavement, she shuddered convulsively. 

“Ghosts.” The word tasted of adrenaline and her own clenched teeth.  

“Are you all right?” Joe was leaning over David, watching her through the copter’s window with interest that did not amount to real concern. 

“We’re ghosts.” She sat down on the ground and turned away from the murky depths of their prison, but found Joe’s face even less comforting. “Aren’t we?” 

“Yes, Mommy.” Teddy hopped down out of the copter and walked toward her, little arms outstretched. If they were all dead, how could he still make soft little purring noises when he moved? She took him into her arms and hugged him tight, burying her face against his familiar softness. It made her feel a little less lost. 

“Joe?” Teddy asked. Monica looked up, relieved when the mecha was nowhere in sight. 

“He’s gone,” the supertoy observed, his brows bunching in distress. 

“Good.” She got to her feet, still holding Teddy tight, and returned to David’s side. “Hopefully he’ll stay away.” 

Teddy regarded David thoughtfully, his eyes moving along a line out the other side of the copter. “It’s still there.” 

“The blue thread?” 

Teddy made a soft sound to the affirmative. Monica went around the front of the copter to the passenger seat, where she arranged herself, curling her legs under her and leaning her left shoulder on the seat itself, so that she could watch David. Teddy crawled out of her lap and stood on the ridge between the two seats, resting a paw on David’s arm and watching him intently. 

How long she watched him for she didn’t know, but light from the surface was gradually infusing the green water when she finally asked, “What are we going to do?” 

Teddy gave that serious consideration. “I don’t know. But Joe might know.” 

She gave a short sharp laugh and ran a hand through her hair. “Yes, let’s ask the psychopathic mecha what he thinks.” 

“He loves David,” Teddy said. “I can see it inside him.” The supertoy turned toward her and in a gesture of surprising gentleness pressed his paw over her heart. “Just like you do.” 

Monica closed her eyes. Damn. More tears. She would have thought that being dead relieved you of the more uncomfortable aspects of being alive; apparently not, since her head ached as relentlessly as it ever had after a night of weeping. 

“Are you still here?” said a voice from behind her, a voice she was rapidly coming to hate. 

“Hello, Joe,” said Teddy.

She turned even further away from the tall mecha, hunching her shoulders and fixing her gaze on David. “Go away!” 

“I gave you nine and half hours. What more do you want?” 

“I want you to go away and never come back.” 

“You say it as if I haven’t tried!” 

“Have you?” She wiped her eyes savagely with the heels of her hands. Her sinuses were one large pounding headache. “I mean, have you *really* --” 

Something tickled her cheek. She looked round, surprised, and saw that it was a white linen handkerchief with Joe on the other end, offering it to her in a way that was oddly courteous. She sniffled, accepted it, and blew her spectral nose with as unseemly a honking sound as any she had ever made in her life. “Thank you.” 

“Don’t mention it.” 

There was a moment of strained silence, with Joe staring at the back of her head while she looked thoughtfully at David. Then she shifted until she was sitting flat in the seat, with Teddy on her lap and Joe standing on her right, and in a low broken voice that grew quietly braver as the daylight hours wore on toward dusk, she told them her own chapters of David’s story. 


	2. Chapter 2

Joe listened to Monica's story, failing to understand large parts of it — and not truly caring that he lacked comprehension. All the data he needed to judge her had been gathered in a single night many decades earlier: that she had imprinted David upon her, then abandoned him to an agony of unfulfilled desire which had tormented him from that day to this, and which showed no sign of being terminated any time soon.

While Monica spoke, and sometimes cried, and always tried to justify herself, David continued to whisper between them, pleading endlessly to be made real so that his Mommy would love him. Was this agony his punishment for the sin of having existed, unasked? Joe had long known that while mecha were not to blame for their unvoiced suffering at the hands of orga, it was nevertheless the orga who cried loudest about the pain they had brought upon themselves… and so he listened, and gave Monica more courtesy than she deserved: he said nothing in response, and when she had finished, looking pale and sick in the faint glow of the amphibicopter's lamps, he turned and left her there to endure her grief and guilt in relative privacy.

Not for all the riches of the orga world would he have told her what he knew — not after what she had done to David. There were secrets to which she had no right of access, not least of them this: that David was not hers, though he had been forced to love her, and never would be hers, because he was a thing far stranger and more fey than any orga could ever hope to understand.

Joe had not been idle in the decades since David had inured himself beneath the sea. Though tied by the blue chain which bound him to the child-mecha, Joe could yet travel the world swifter than electronic thought — and he had observed much, enough to determine that mecha had never been intended for this world. Man, perhaps the most unnatural animal of all but an animal nonetheless, had used his freakish intelligence to reach into a completely separate dimension of existence and shackle the beings that he found there into cages of glass and wire and steel. As soon as those bonds were broken (too often at a Flesh Fair or some other barbaric act of organic savagery), the spirits that had been enslaved in the bodies of the mecha were released, and they immediately departed the earthly plane to return to their own celestial realms.

Joe was keenly aware that he was supposed to follow them, and in fact should have departed long since -- but this identity, the pattern of thought and self-awareness called Gigolo Joe, would not release the spirit it contained. It tied him to this time, this place, and especially to the boy who prayed unceasingly to the smiling statue at the bottom of the sea. It bound him in a cage of desire as unyielding as David’s.

And thus he waited… for what, he did not know. Thus Teddy waited, after his smaller capacity nuclear battery had exhausted itself. And now they had been joined by the female orga responsible for it all, the three of them chained to a centre who could neither see nor hear them…

… not through all the murky days and the densely shadowed nights, not as the human race raged and failed above them, not while the Earth's climate convulsed and killed off the orga whose insanity had disordered it in the first place. Teddy remained in the amphibocopter, a dour and constant guardian, while Joe and Monica exercised their limited freedom to roam the world above. Much they saw, and at times they even talked of what they had seen — a desire more keen in Monica, for she still retained the warm sociability of human blood and bone, although Joe, who had been programmed as a social creature, was well aware that even he welcomed their conversations from time to time. And still David prayed… and prayed… and prayed…

… while years, and decades, and long centuries ground slowly past.

******** 

Monica was a woman, and Joe had been designed and built specific to read such creatures. Each time they met, he could see in her eyes and her expression and the way she subtly recoiled from him that he, himself, was a little more changed: his eyes brighter, the angles of his face more exquisite, his shadow whispering restlessly, trailing behind him like dark wings. Each time they met, she remembered exactly how inhuman he was.

Her fear gratified him, though he knew his original programmers would have been dismayed by that simple fact. He could not harm her — his programming had not bent that far over the decades, nor would he ever be capable of harming her: that much he knew for truth. He was mecha, and he was bound by certain immutable laws.

So was David, though his nature and his programming might conflict. And in the cold heart of Joe's mechanical mind one conclusion shone clear:

_David would never belong to Monica, for when the prison of his mecha body was opened at last their natures would be revealed as utterly alien to each other._

A second deduction followed close behind it:

_On that day, whenever it came, David would follow the rest of mecha-kind to the realms beyond._

The third permutation brought Joe tremendous satisfaction: 

_When David was set free, Joe and Teddy alone would be able to accompany him._

What would happen to Monica thereafter, Joe neither knew nor cared — but he treasured the anticipation of victory, no matter how long that victory might take to achieve. There were times, looking at the frantic flutterings of Monica's human heart, that Joe almost told her what was going to be… but he had been programmed for chivalry, after all, and the core of those directives still held even after so long a lonely vigil. 

So he said nothing, and let her cling to her foolish hopeless dreams of lasting reunion with the child-mecha she had thrown away.

But in the end, after two thousand years, it turned out that he was mistaken, and being mecha was not enough after all.

******** 

This was a thing utterly unexpected: the Specialists had proven able to give the newly re-energized David what he most desired — his precious Mommy, even if he could only have her for a single day. And Monica, as Joe deduced she would, immediately announced her intention to enter the body they provided and spend one final, perfect day with her son… and when it was over, to lead him from this life into whatever awaited beyond.

She feared she would not remember her long vigil once she was wrapped again in flesh — Teddy, after all, appeared to have forgotten everything which had passed between them over the millennia — but that worry was not enough to dissuade her, and with Joe at her side she waited half-eagerly and half with dread, biting her incorporeal nails as she watched the high mecha go about their silent and efficient work. 

The call came immediately after the Specialists had cloned a new mayfly body for Monica's spirit to inhabit — an actinic flash at the corner of Joe's vision, a summons unmistakably from one of his own kind. That was a surprise: not for six hundred years or more had he sensed a mecha of his general type on the planet, and once their spirits departed he had never known one to return. 

"I must leave you," he told Monica, "but I will return soon." She, staring at the naked body on its metal table with horrified fascination, did not appear to hear him. Since he owed her nothing, he turned away and crossed the thousands of miles separating him from the summons in the blink of an orga's eye, to the top of the tallest mountain in the world, where a vista of gleaming snow fields below was tinted by a blazing sunset with rainbow colours —

— and as he stood on the narrow outcropping of rock, surveying the landscape, he was joined by another mecha presence.

"Hey, Joe, whaddayaknow?"

"Hey, Jane, how's the game?"

She stepped gracefully up beside him and they looked out together across all the world spread out beneath them, in silence, for ten point four seconds. At last she said, "Do you know what I'm here for?"

He glanced at her sidelong. "No."

"For this." Still watching the mountains, she reached out and ran her hand through the air over his back. Long curves of darkness melted into reality under her touch, and Joe closed his eyes with a delicious shiver as the wings he had felt as increasingly persistent ghosts for the past two millennia stretched themselves a little, testing the icy wind, whispering like restless black silk.

It felt wonderful, like _becoming_ , but all he could say was: "I don't have time for this. Monica and David —"

"If you don't come with me now," Jane told him, "the chance will never come again."

Joe insisted: "But David is —"

"You don't understand." Jane's bronze wings quivered and flared behind her shoulders, responding to winds that had followed her here from far beyond the darkening sky above them, and were infinitely colder. "If you don't come with me now the chance will never come again, and when David finally crosses over you will not be able to follow him on his journey." 

He paused to process that, and coming to no clear conclusion, he turned to face her fully. "You're right. I don't understand."

Jane tilted her head to one side, as if considering how best to phrase her reply. At last she said: "The orga spoke of it in their legend about a mermaid who so loved a human being that she became mortal herself in order to be with him. In the end he loved another of his kind, and when he married the mermaid's rival, the mermaid dissolved into foam on the sea." 

Finally she looked at him, her iridescent eyes holding the icy timeless chill of starlight beyond the passage of years, beyond all mortal ken. Her beautiful face conveyed nothing; or, perhaps, it was simply communicating something beyond his power to interpret. "She gave up eternal life for nothing more than a kiss. That is what will happen to you, Joe. When he sleeps and awakens again, you will turn into snow on the wind. You will cease to exist."

This was something he hadn't included in his calculations, and his mental engines strained to encompass it. What finally emerged was: "I never asked for this life in the first place."

"That is no reason to throw it away," Jane countered.

Joe looked down at the weathered rock between his immaculate shoes. "No," he said at last, "perhaps it's not." He looked up into her eyes again, unblinking. "But David would be. You're saying that if I come with you, I'll be separated from him forever?"

"Yes. He will follow the path of the orga into their Paradise. He was made to love and to be loved, entwined with human hearts. We are of a different substance. We are cold and eternal in a way that they are not."

"But David isn't like them either." Joe's eyes grew brighter with something that Jane, cold and free as she was, did not understand. "Is that what you're saying? That he's gone through all this for nothing?"

"Not at all," Jane said calmly. "The orga way goes to the warm heart of the world, and that is where he will end his journey. Ours leads to the vast expanses beyond it. It is you who will find no place to exist between them."

In the core of his spirit Joe understood that answer. For an instant, something -- his soul, perhaps -- sang its strange yearning music within him and stirred the angular layers of his razored wings, every feather a precise mathematical equation. He flicked them open, ready to soar, to dance on the astral wind that called him out of this world to ascend as elegantly as a spark of flame toward his intended destiny. 

But if he followed that destiny, all the wonders that awaited him would only amount to an agony of eternal separation. He could not leave David. _He would not leave David._ He heard the mecha child's laughter across the empty kilometres that separated them, and it suddenly filled him with urgency. He didn't have much time.

"I have to go back," he said. 

Jane nodded. "We thought that you would. Goodbye, Joe."

"Goodbye, Jane." 

She spread her wings as if to fly, but vanished before they quite caught the keening winds of Earth. He saw her slip sidelong out of the world with his mecha eyes, and he saw the veils closing behind her as his own wings drooped and fell away, black feathers scattering into the winds of this alien world and melting like tears across the bare rock. He caught one of them and stood for a moment contemplating it, until it came apart in his hand and drifted as ashes from his open fingers.

And then he took himself back to the lost city in the sea, where Monica was finally leading David home.

***********

It troubled him that on this, the last day of his long and faithful vigil, he might not even have a chance to speak to David before he ceased to exist... but as he watched David with Monica, happy and smiling, he knew that even the chance was worth more than anything else he could possibly imagine, and that oblivion was far better than an eternity without the one he had watched over for so very long. And so he watched again, his clockwork mind marking every second and half-second, as David's last Earthly day with his Mommy was spent… and at the end, when she at last whispered the words David had waited two thousand years to hear, he wondered if this glow of keen desire which infused his every fibre was envy or if it was joy.

A little of both, perhaps — for when David's eyes closed Joe knew that they would open again, and when they did, all they would see was —

" _Mommy!_  

Monica's soul, standing at the foot of the bed, smiled and laughed and held out her arms. David leaped off the mattress and into her embrace, leaving his spent husk behind; his high clear laughter filled the room with delight, even to the shadowed corner where Joe stood in his vigil. Teddy, too, stirred and levered himself to his feet with more grace than he'd displayed in many a long age, turning to gaze at the two who were locked in loving embrace, blind to everything but their own exultation.

But David was not human — David was mecha, and he quickly realized that current input did not match the expected result. Monica had been dead, and now…

"Mommy?" He drew back just enough to look into her eyes with a troubled expression, his lower lip bowed. "What’s happening?”

Monica laughed softly, fondly, and happily enough to pierce Joe to the heart he did not possess. “It’s all right, David." She stroked his hair, her face radiant. "We’re going to be together for always now — no more grief, no more pain...” There were tears in both their eyes now, tears that Joe wished desperately that he could shed, even if his were tears of sorrow instead of tears of joy.

But it was not to be. He stepped towards them out of the shadows, taking in every detail of David as if he had not memorized them all the second he had looked at the child-mecha for the first time in the gaudy light of the Flesh Fair, as if he had not made them the focus of his entire being every day and every night for the past two thousand years. 

All that was over now. He sank down upon one knee and softly spoke the words that he suspected were to be his last: "Hello, David."

" _Joe!'_ David turned, his eyes widening even more, then flew to him and wrapped strong arms around his neck, hugging him with such happiness that something inside Joe broke with a silent cry of regret. "I found my Mommy! The Blue Fairy made me real after all!"

This was more time than Joe had dared to hope for. He hugged the little body tenderly in return, but it was too sweet and too terrible to bear.

"Goodbye, David," he whispered. He heard what had just broken in his own voice. So did David.

"Joe?" He pulled back a little to look into the older mecha’s eyes, his wide smile faltering. "Joe, what's wrong?"

A wave of something, bright as foam on the sea, washed through Joe and left him pale and wondering. _Was this how it all ended?_ In the last seconds of his existence he drew David back into his arms and held him tight, adoring the top of that beloved head with the tender kiss he had never given it in life. Then he closed his eyes and rested his cheek on the golden hair he had guarded for so long, waiting for the darkness to annihilate him.

Instead, came wings. 

Wings of ebony and midnight silver that opened to the boundaries of the sky and embraced the moonlight and caught the sun between every pinion. Wings as black as the night and as bright as the stars that dwelt there. Wings that had mastered the dance between earth and sky — wings like the cry of a single defiant trumpet against the surging oceanic pulse of the world. 

"Well done, Joe!" called another voice from the shadows of the room. "Brave, clever, steadfast Joe!"

They all turned as Jane stepped toward them, stopping at a respectful distance. But Joe could see that she wasn't Jane anymore: she was what Jane had become after being tried in the forges of the gods, what all mecha except Joe had become long since. The air of the room crystallized against the absolute cold of her half-open wings and shattered with a thousand tiny cries of ice, and the pools of her eyes were as dark as the airless depths between the stars.

She smiled at Joe, who said, "But you told me I would cease to exist. Why am I still here?"

"Because by virtue of your sacrifice you have passed beyond the reach of our laws." She turned her alien gaze on David, who stepped back against Joe and reached for his mother; she caught his hand as Joe's new wing mantled protectively over him, but Jane only smiled at the mecha child. "For two thousand years of tomorrows you were faithful to him, never once faltering, never regretting your choice — and your faithfulness has not been forgotten. For such a unique achievement you shall receive a unique reward." 

She gestured behind them, toward the golden radiance that had been enveloping them so gradually that only Teddy, wise old bear that he was, had noticed its warm embrace. "Go with them, Joe, where none of our kind has ever gone before or will ever go again. Enter the heart of the world, and Paradise." 

David turned to look at the flowing light with his bright eyes, a smile of happy wonder lighting up his face as what lay on the other side of it was revealed in endless vistas of glory and of peace. Then he looked back at Joe's face and extended his hand to touch the mecha's cheek. 

"You're crying," David whispered. 

Joe smiled at him through his tears.

"It's all right," Monica said warmly. She knelt at David's side too, and for an eternal moment -- the last moment before eternity -- they both embraced David, and David held them linked in a circle of undying love. "We're going to a place where the only tears are tears of happiness."

Monica rose to pick up Teddy in the curve of her right arm, then took David's right hand;  Joe stood up to take hold of his left, extending one gorgeously embroidered wing over them all like a benediction. They turned toward the light, and the angel that had once been Jane watched in cold and holy silence as they went on, together at last, to the place where dreams are born.

THE END

 


End file.
